Biography

Born in Madrid (Spain) in 1983 and living in London (United Kingdom). I am a Lecturer in Computer Games and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Essex (Colchester, UK). I hold a Ph.D in Computer Science from the University of Essex (2015) and a Master degree in Computer Science from University Carlos III (Madrid, Spain; 2007).

My research is centred in the application of Artificial Intelligence to games, Reinforcement Learning and Evolutionary Computation. At the moment, I am especially interested on General Video Game Playing, which involves the creation of content and agents that play any real-time game that is given to it. I am author of more than 20 papers in the field of Game AI (in more than 10 as first author), published in the main conferences of the field of Computational Intelligence in Games and Evolutionary Computation. I have publications in highly respected journals such as IEEE TCIAIG (the top journal on the Game AI field) and IEEE TEC (which counts with one of highest impact factors in Computer Science). I have also organised international competitions for the Game AI research community, such as the Physical Travelling Salesman Competition, and the General Video Game AI Competition, held in IEEE (WCCI, CIG) and ACM (GECCO) International Conferences.

I also experience in the videogames industry as a game programmer (Revistronic; Madrid, Spain), with titles published for both PC and consoles. I worked as a software engineer (Game Brains; Dublin, Ireland), where I was in charge of developing AI tools that can be applied to the latest industry videogames.

Finally, I have experience as a lecturer, teaching the 'Games Console Programming' module at the University of Essex, where techniques and methodologies for developing games are taught using the Unity3D game engine. Additionally, I have also lectured the module 'Computational Intelligence in Games (Team Project)' at the University of Magdeburg, when the latest Game AI techniques (such as Monte Carlo Tree Search) are taught for creating agents for General Video Game Playing.